Look at your intelligence on your competitors, your competitive environment, your customers, your suppliers, that is, on your entire corporate environment. How current is that intelligence? Using the above analogy, after some period of time, say 90-180 days, your data, and therefore the conclusions which you have based on that data, and the actions you have planned to take based on those analyses, are at least “cold”.

Add to the fact that so many just monitor Internet sources for competitive intelligence, and you can understand why companies make some uninformed decisions. Even some of the data which is news, is old news with the reporting party’s bias. You need to include conversation with people in your mix to really stay current.